The cheating scandal at Harvard shows how tests of knowledge can test
character, too

Fingers on buzzers: how seriously should we take the actions of an American university student who sneaked a look at questions for an inter-college quiz tournament that his team went on to win? Andy Watkins was so good at high school and college quizzes that he also set them for the organising body, National Academic Quiz Tournaments (NAQT). He had an employee log-in for its website and, using this, he was able to look at questions in advance.

Now that he has been found out, his university, Harvard, has been stripped of a string of “quiz bowl” championship titles – to the great delight, we can be sure, of every other college in and outside the Ivy League. Watkins himself is in no doubt about the gravity of his offence. His mea culpa refers to his “immaturity” and fragile state of mind: “It will surprise no one that my mental health as an undergraduate was always on the wrong side of 'unstable’, but that does not excuse my actions, nor does it ameliorate the damage done.”

The damage done? This is the sort of statement you might hope to hear from a Bernie Madoff after his Ponzi scheme has unravelled, not a student playing quiz games for fun. Except that fun clearly didn’t come into it.

NAQT, its website says, “is a company run by former players and coaches that provides tournament questions, practice questions, rules, and guidance to all manner of quiz bowl tournaments, from casual competitions among fraternities to intense state championships for teams that have been holding daily practices”. Coaches? Daily practices? Calling it quiz bowl is obviously intended to align the answering of general knowledge questions with the high-impact world of gridiron football, and the two appear to be played in the same spirit, in the US at least.

Of course, quizzes have always been susceptible to corruption, but usually where there’s money involved. Charles Ingram, a former Army major, won the top prize from Chris Tarrant on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? before accusations that he had been assisted by a coughing accomplice led to disgrace and a conviction for deception. The fixing of television quiz shows in Fifties America became a national scandal; the academic Charles Van Doren’s name still resonates more than 50 years after he admitted to a Congressional subcommittee that he had been given the answers to questions by the producers of Twenty One.

But anyone who thinks that cash matters clearly hasn’t been on a quiz team lately. While Gavin Fuller, Telegraph librarian and the youngest ever winner of Mastermind, rolls his eyes at the seriousness with which Americans take the sport compared with Brits – who still instinctively insert the word “pub” before “quiz” – he’s also ferociously competitive and rues the fact that mobile phones have made it easy for cheats to prosper. For the fact is that, just as you can’t play knockabout snooker – you’re either pocketing the balls or you aren’t – so the quiz player is exposed to an inescapable succession of Govean-Darwinian truths: you either know the answer or you don’t, and no one’s interested in your anguished, gurning reassurances to the rest of the table that it’ll come to you in a minute.

Last week, a Telegraph team, including Gavin, won one of the two charity quizzes that we enter each year. I hope that we were gracious winners – but we’d have been as sour as week-old milk if we’d lost. Or, more precisely, what we would have done was rake over all of those “I told you so” moments where a lone and reasonable voice was shouted down by the rest of the team (vanilla pods do indeed come from orchids, as Gavin suggested). Some of these grievances can fester for years – that’s what happens when you recruit a team of people with the most retentive memories in the office.

We might, too, have resurrected the question of how many stars there are on the New Zealand flag, where the rest of the team meekly deferred to a half-Kiwi member, only to find he hadn’t a clue. But as it was, we were able to slap the same colleague warmly on the back for dredging up the name of the song that Bill Murray wakes to each morning in Groundhog Day (it was I Got You Babe).

In the end, this seriousness of purpose and sense of team effort are what make cheating in quizzes such an offence. As an appalled American quizzer blogs of the Watkins case, “Quiz Bowl basically works on the honour code”. It is a matter of shame, rather than gain.

David Nicholls’s novel Starter for Ten has an exquisite moment of cheating at its heart, when the narrator Brian goes on to University Challenge armed with an answer that he has seen in advance. Having wrestled with his conscience beforehand, he proceeds to blow the moment spectacularly by answering the question before it is delivered.

That could only happen in the adversarial, finger-on-buzzer world of oral quizzes that Salter shared, but even in the exam hall conditions of the pub quiz we would do well to remember Brian’s prior advice to himself: “As Mum, and Sartre, would probably say, 'You’re only cheating yourself’.”